For What We Really Are
by DrWorm
Summary: "... he found himself frozen in shock at the tableau that greeted his eyes, a sight that put even Lazarus to shame." Will can't decide which side Jack Sparrow is on.


Notes: Bloody pirate mania suckered me in.

For What We Really Are   
  


"—learn that you can't kill me?" There was a sound, gruesomely wet, thick with fluid, and reminiscent of the disembowelment of a hog that would soon be supper. Silence did not fall, but it penetrated. And then the noise was repeated, this time accompanied excruciatingly by a tomcat's yowl of pain. Will Turner spun on his heel, his arm tensed and his sword ready to exact a revenge as foolhardy as it was impotent. But he found himself frozen in shock at the tableau that greeted his eyes, a sight that put even Lazarus to shame.

He was one of them. 

Captain Jack Sparrow stumbled back very slightly. "Interesting," his voice echoed in the dank recesses of the caves, which joined like the tunnels of an extensive anthill, the natural and unnatural construction of those who scurry and hoard for their livings. One thin wrist, all bone and scraps of cloth as decayed as if exhumed from a grave ten years forgotten, passed in front of demon eyes that glittered in the moonlight. "Very interesting." He grinned at Barbossa and light reflected off of gold just as the sun's rays reflect off of the moon to make it glow in the deepest dark of night. And then the glitter became unbearable to Will's eyes; he blinked and watched as Jack's skeleton flipped a tantalizing Aztec coin over the bones of his fingers with ease. "I just couldn't resist, mate." 

The moment of relative peace was broken by a growl from Barbossa and the sudden clash of steel on steel. The sound delivered a raw and unpleasant jolt to Will's consciousness: the battle was still on. But his movements were automatic, his fighting no more than weakly defensive; his eyes flickered back and forth, more interested in the compelling movement of two figures engaged in a battle spanning more than a decade. The sword that he'd always considered to be simply an extension of his arm had also shown itself for what it really was: a tool, a weapon, something he controlled. The thought both comforted and frightened him. To control an implement that could kill when he could not control another person was small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless. And yet it made the knowledge of his mortality surge forward in his young consciousness. He'd said he'd die for Elizabeth, but that had been in a moment of, as he now understood it, cowardly adolescent bravado. Now that the possibility was dangled so close in front of him, in all of its glossy appeal and repugnant imperfections, he was not quite so sure.

As he fought, his stomach clenched uncomfortably with the pain of betrayal and confusion. He had retained sanity by easily dividing his world into the immediate separation of good and bad, innocent and cursed. That Jack Sparrow walked the line between the distinctions, and that he did it with such careless grace, made Will uncomfortable in a way that he could scarcely admit to himself, let alone put into words. The world had become separated into _us_ versus _them and suddenly Jack was neither. _

He'd never been quite good or bad to begin with, however, but Will had wanted him to be. Deep down in the place that had desperately wished his father to be the good man Will had always been convinced he was, he wanted Jack Sparrow to be on his side as well. On the side of good. Though he knew that there were good men who did not share his views and bad men who did, in the muddle and confusion of the moment he simply wanted the concrete assurance of universal right and wrong, the child's daydream that persisted in haunting him as he continued to grow into his manhood and determine whether he wanted to be on the side of good or on the side of right, and whether or not those two sides were necessarily the same.

He watched distractedly as Sparrow and Barbossa danced in and out of the streams of moonlight. Flesh to bone, illusion to reality, the warmth of vitality to the cool indifference of the tomb. Jack would not able to feel his touch, of course, but Will experienced a sudden urge to caress the other man in his rawest form.

"—until Judgment Day?" And Will grinned because he was positively sure that they needed no Second Coming of Christ to judge Captain Barbossa. He pivoted wildly as a rush of adrenaline surged through his bloodstream and caught his own less-than-worthy adversary against the temple, giving Will precious few moments to relocate closer to where the two self-proclaimed captains still dueled. 

A sharp cry of anguish ripped past Will's ears, so quickly gone he was unsure that it ever existed. He jerked his gaze up and watched Jack stumble, with only the slightest twinge of humility, into a pool of milky-white light, luminescent and dangerous though it seemed. The stripping of the layers of chimera imposed by the curse made the transition nearly as revealing as taking off one's clothes; Will's eyes widened at the realization. It was intimate in a way that was not possible in the safety of the world he had previously inhabited, the world of the blacksmith's shop where the threat of pirates was unlikely and curses were nothing more than fairytales. And he plainly understood, as Jack's skeletal shoulders sagged, that Captain Sparrow would never tread the paths of good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, as the dichotomy held no allure for him; it was the middle ground that he plainly found to be so much more interesting. Jack had no code of ethics, no moral standard to which he held himself to. He was a pirate, just as Will's father had been. But, Will reassured himself privately, that did not mean that Jack Sparrow was not a good man. 

A dull thud of something heavy against human remains made him twitch; Elizabeth's voice brought him mercifully back into the present moment. Her words sounded shrill and greasy with the fear that she was trying so hard to swallow. "Whose side is he on, anyway?" She nodded at Jack as he took a leap back into the blessed darkness, out of reach of the skeletal Barbossa.

"Right now?" Will shrugged weakly, sure that he would never be able to explain to her that Jack was on no one's side but his own.


End file.
